Top Skills for a Successful Management Career

As you make decision to pursue an MBA, whatever be the reason, either acquire knowledge and skills to position yourself better to get a high profile job, promotion at current profession or entrepreneurship. Irrespective of reason, you need to harness a fundamental set of qualities. Aspiring managers of today need strong skill sets to be able to impress business employers and move ahead swiftly on the ladder of success. Recruiters highly value right skill set along with the degree you gain, and the knowledge you have.

Here are the management-related skills an MBA student should start focusing upon from early stage of his or her degree:

Interpersonal skills: Getting along with people in your sphere, enjoying social interactions, business discussions and good communication skill is the key to connect and deal with people tactfully in all situations. Strong interpersonal skills are incomplete without being good at listening to others and displaying a great sense of emotional intelligence while understanding feelings, attitude and behaviors of people. It is essential to create good connect and develop strong work networks. Ability to influence others while sharing your point of view is a great advantage to nurture better interpersonal relationships at work.

Critical Thinking: Managers with the ability to offer out of the box solutions for a problem are highly desired and appreciated in present business world. The ability to critically think from different perspectives to analyze a business problem comes from a vast exposure to different business verticals, knowledge of current affairs, actively indulging into discussions on current state of economy and its drivers and how the volatile, uncertain and ambiguous business environment impacts a business has to be deeply understood. For acquiring critical thinking skills, an MBA student has to be very active and vigilant about the professional world.

Decision making: It goes without saying that you need to be good at the ability to take right decision at right time. This starts with taking independent decisions for small things and holding complete accountability for your own decisions. Taking initiatives and responsibility by actively involving into institutional activities gives you an edge in decision making. Being a management student you need to be proactively ready for taking extra responsibilities and volunteering for various event organizing committees. Right decision making skill takes you long in the career.

Team Spirit: Even before you move to the world of work, you are required to work in teams on various projects, assignments, presentations and the quality of work would depend on your team skills, ability to lead team by setting example as well as ability to motivate others for performing better. Here all your other skills, like interpersonal skills, problem solving and decision making will be helpful to make you an effective team member and a real contributor for the organization.

Time Management: Having said about various skills above renders versatility to an individual and needless to say that the right time management will only let you master all above skills. It is an absolute essential that you learn and practice the art of task prioritization, effective organization of work and utilizing the time judiciously. Two years are extremely important from the perspective that how you divide time for your studies, classes, activities, networking, recreation and personality development initiatives as these are only going to determine your future management career.

To pick up all these skills, you need to have a positive attitude to grab all the learning opportunities while pursuing your course. Be it management events and fests, internships, projects and assignments, student societies and representative bodies, entrepreneurship cell of institute where you always have golden chance to acquire life skills. To summarize all, the dedication and involvement required while pursuing management education, not only needs all the hard work but smart work as well to add skill set which will sharpen your persona and effectively project you as a successful future manager!

By - Dr. Pallavi Chandwaskar

Assistant Professor,

DR V N BRIMS, Thane